http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/best-vinyl-albums-esqsyn
It's an admirable compilation, but it's based on the releases' sonic components and misses one crucial thing: the album art and accompanying memorabilia that make record collecting so much fun. So, here's this vinyl junkie's
Top 10 Albums To Collect on Vinyl
10. Children's Television Workshop's kids' albums from the 1970s
If you have a hankerin' for your 1970s kids' TV favorites, these records are worth tracking down for the assorted trinkets placed within for the purpose of youth education. The original 1970 Sesame Street Book & Record came with a book containing a groovy drawing of Big Bird holding a flower and a really strange liquid-like Cookie Monster depiction, and later releases of the decade featured punch-out letters and stick-on signs if you're lucky enough to find them still intact with a playable album that doesn't look like some kid dragged it down a dirt road behind their wagon. The original 1972 release of The Electric Company cast album included an album-size "decoder wheel" that helped kids learn phonics when aligned within holes cut in the album cover, and I've never even seen it beyond Internet pictures and the original Billboard ad promoting the release because I own the 1974 reissue that downsized it all down to a simple cover and sleeve that differed from the original.
9. Jackson Browne - Running On Empty (1978)
As befitting an album about life on the road, the original version came with a tour program.
8. Electric Light Orchestra - Out of the Blue (1977)
The original pressings came with a paper spaceship that you could punch out and assemble. It was reinstated for the 2007 30th anniversary CD reissue, but it's just not as AUTHENTIC that way.
7. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
I could go with 1968's The Beatles (White Album) for the postcard portraits and lyric poster within, but I'm going with Sgt. Pepper on the grounds that you really don't want to squint to see who's assembled for the portrait, now do you?
6. & 5. Styx - Paradise Theatre (1981) and Kilroy Was Here (1983)
Paradise Theatre had a beautiful laser-etched design on the record itself, while anyone with enough perseverence to find a version of Kilroy with the plastic wrapper still intact gets a Moral Majority-mocking sticker warning buyers of "secret backward messages" that beat the PMRC to the punch by two years.
4. Alice Cooper - Billion Dollar Babies (1973)
Cool faux leather design depicting record-sleeve-as-wallet with a coin on the front showing a baby wearing Alice's eye makeup. Honorable mention goes to Cooper's 1972 release School's Out, which opened up like a desk once you tore off the paper panties that wrapped the original pressings.
3. Alan Parsons Project - Stereotomy (1985)
2. Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery (1973)
It's farkin' H.R. Giger art, what more do ya want? Not to mention a wickedly cool gatefold enveloping the inner sleeve.
1. Yes - Relayer (1974)